


Free and Alone

by dawnperhaps



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-20
Updated: 2012-05-20
Packaged: 2017-11-05 17:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/409080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnperhaps/pseuds/dawnperhaps
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabriel isn’t sure what he thinks of Sam Winchester, but Lucifer seems to know and wants to make sure his little brother doesn’t get in his way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Free and Alone

When Lucifer shows up, Gabriel is in West Virginia, eating a bag of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups and watching a cheating husband lose his mind over suspicions of his wife’s infidelity.  One weird message in their email inbox and the guy is practically a raving lunatic.  Gabriel knows there are bigger issues at hand, but he doesn’t like those issues and it is way more fun watching Mr. Williams call every private investigator in town, babbling like an idiot and using his free hand to dig through his wife’s sock drawer.  The guy is a first class prick and Gabriel is happy to be back in his element, trying to forget about the apocalypse, his family, and Sam Winchester’s warm, chocolate-colored eyes.

So when Lucifer is suddenly standing in front of him outside Mr. William’s house, Gabriel is a little caught off guard, very annoyed, and completely horrified.

_No.  Not now._

“Gabriel,” Lucifer greets pleasantly, like their meeting is an accident.

“Lucille,” Gabriel replies, his eyes flickering over to the devil as he continues to face the house. 

“No hug?” the older archangel asks, pushing out his lower lip slightly.

“Little busy.”

“I can fix that,” Lucifer offers, and takes them to a deserted alleyway with a snap of his fingers.  It’s much darker than the front yard of the Williams residence, no streetlights or passing cars to brighten the shadows on their faces.  Gabriel starts a little and Lucifer just smiles, the white of his teeth standing out dangerously in the darkness.  “See?  Schedule’s all free now.”

“I’m not big on family reunions,” Gabriel says, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat.  He fingers the handle of his blade, unsure of where this is going.  He had hoped to never come face to face with Lucifer ever again.  In fact, when he left Heaven, he’d hoped to never come face to face with any angel ever again.  His heart feels like a cement block, pushing down on all his vessel’s internal organs and making his whole body hurt.  Lucifer is not the same brother he once clung to, but his Grace shines the same way, bringing back everything Gabriel escaped so long ago.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.  I’ve been back for so long now and you haven’t even stopped by with a casserole,” Lucifer says sadly.  He leans against the brick building to his left and casually crosses his legs.  “How’s Michael?”

“You’d have to ask him,” Gabriel says lightly, shrugging his shoulders.

“You two aren’t joined at the hip anymore, I see,” Lucifer says, chuckling to himself.  “I remember it like it was yesterday, you know.  Michael and Gabriel, Gabriel and Michael.”  Lucifer sighs in mock nostalgia.  “How many cities did the two of you destroy together?  Daddy’s perfect little angels.”

Outwardly, Gabriel rolls his eyes, a smirk playing on his lips.  Internally, though, he feels his heart shrink, the light of his Grace bending and refracting, burning holes through his chest from the inside out.  He can still hear echoes of the screams he heard as he broke the ground apart under people’s feet and allowed them to be swallowed by the earth while, next to him, Michael took up a sword to finish the job.  At the time, it had seemed so necessary.  The screams had been the screams of sinners, people who deserved their fate.  Now, in his memories, the screams sound different and ‘sinner’ seems like such an insufficient label for a human being.

“You even incited war among your own family members,” Lucifer continues.  “And that was without Michael’s help, wasn’t it?  Damn, you grew up fast.”

“The Nephilim weren’t angels.  They were out of control, dangerous monsters,” Gabriel tells him, his eyes hard.  He refuses to fall apart from his brother’s instigation.  Even in their youth, in the most innocent of games, Lucifer could easily spot and exploit any weakness.  He’d been a brilliant soldier.  They’d all been brilliant soldiers.

“And their fathers?”

“Fell,” Gabriel says curtly, raising an eyebrow at Lucifer.  As if he doesn’t know where this is going.

“Fell?” Lucifer snaps, angering quickly.  He pushes away from the wall and steps closer.  “They were driven out!”

“Nope.  Pretty sure they fell,” Gabriel says with a too friendly smile, watching the fire burn brighter in his brother’s eyes.  He lets his smile turn cruel.  “You know.  Kinda like you.”

“I didn’t fall!” Lucifer growls, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides in a surprisingly humanlike way.  “Michael, _big brother extraordinaire_ , grabbed a sword and shoved me in a cage!”  He lets out a harsh laugh, looking almost manic, and if Gabriel were any less detached, he’d be sick at thought that Lucifer had been driven to this state of misery.  “Not that I would have expected you to notice.  Too busy sucking Michael off, I bet.”

Gabriel gasps sarcastically, raising a hand to his mouth.  “Luci.  What would Dad say?”

“Dad doesn’t say a lot of things nowadays, I hear,” Lucifer sneers.

Gabriel lets his hand fall and shakes his head.  “Again.  I wouldn’t know.  You could ask Michael.  I bet he’d know.”

“I’m not here about Dad.  Or Michael.”

“Gee, I give up, then.  What do you want?”

“I know how you feel about Sam,” Lucifer says, his face expressionless.  He’s in control again, or so he thinks.  Gabriel happily chuckles in his face.

“I know how you feel about Sam, too,” Gabriel informs him.  “Actually, everyone knows how you feel about Sam.”

“Yeah, but there’s a difference,” Lucifer says, holding up a finger.  Gabriel huffs out a laugh, forcing his concerns and his so-called feelings for Sam Winchester and his warm, chocolate-colored eyes into an unreachable part of his mind, focusing instead on how ridiculous it is that Lucifer thinks he can lecture him after all these thousands of years.

“You see, you think you can save Sam Winchester,” Lucifer continues, pacing in front of him while Gabriel keeps his feet rooted to the ground.  “You think you can alter destiny.”

“Destiny, schmestiny.  Honestly, I don’t give two shits about your pissing match with Michael, Lucifer,” Gabriel snaps, exhausted of talking about it and hearing about it and reading about it from the scrawling, shaking hand of every prophet in existence.  Even as Loki, he’d heard news of an impending apocalypse, brought on by his two brothers using Earth as their wrestling ring.  “In fact, I very recently told those two idiots Heaven calls your vessels to just shut up and take it from the two of you.”

“Yeah, you did just tell them that.  I was pretty surprised how quickly you changed your mind, too,” Lucifer says with a smirk.  “You’re easier to read than ever, you know.  Must be all that time around humans.  Hell, I barely have to invade your privacy to know exactly how you feel.”

“Alright, _bro_ ,” Gabriel spits, his Grace flaring in his stomach as Lucifer’s arrogance finally gets the better of him.  “Let’s pretend you don’t deserve to get sucker punched in the face for even suggesting that you know shit about me.  Which you don’t, by the way, because you abandoned me, Michael, Raphael, and every other angel in the garrison because you had to move down one fucking seat at the dinner table.  You don’t know jack shit because you were too busy ripping our family apart to pay attention to any of us.”  Gabriel notices a tightness in his throat and in his chest that he recognizes as both sadness and guilt, two unfortunate side effects of studying away from Heaven’s emotion-free curriculum for too long.  “So, fine, let’s pretend that I don’t want to gut you for any of that.  I’d love to know why you’re here pissing me off when you should be wooing your pretty little boy toy into ruining his life and loaning you his body for the rest of forever.  Because I got to tell you, getting Sam Winchester to betray anyone he cares about is going to be a heck of a lot harder than you seem to think it will be.”

Lucifer is silent for a long time after that and Gabriel is quickly aware of how heavily he’s breathing, how tight the muscles in his shoulders are, how every single one of his emotions is manifesting itself in some sort of human side effect.  Lucifer studies him as he tries to force himself to calm down, to not let Lucifer provoke him, even though he knows that promise to himself has already been broken.  Lucifer is probably sneaking around in his mind, looking in all the nooks and crannies, but Gabriel still isn’t certain what he’s after, so he’s not sure what to hide from him.

“Wow.  Didn’t realize you were that crazy about the guy,” Lucifer finally says, like Gabriel is some sort of science experiment and his original hypothesis was just proven incorrect.

“What the fuck does any of this have to do with Sam?” Gabriel practically moans, weary of his brother’s mind games.

“I want you to back off,” Lucifer tells him.

“Back off what?” Gabriel demands, throwing his hands up.  “I told you.  You and Michael can kill each other if you really want to.  Rip the family apart completely.  Drag Raphael down here and use him as a baseball bat to bash the other’s skull in.  I don’t care!”

“Enough!” Lucifer growls at him, taking a few menacing steps closer to him.  Gabriel just glares, holding his ground.  “I get it.  You’re angry.  You blame me for everything that happened.  And I’m sorry, little brother.  I am.”

“Don’t lie to me, you cunt,” the younger archangel snarls.  Every part of him is aching now, especially the parts he’d been trying to ignore since he fled Heaven, and he just wants to break the sky open and fly into it, disappear forever and float somewhere angels and God and family doesn’t exist.  He stares into Lucifer’s eyes and, this time, doesn’t recognize him at all.  “You’d do it all over again.  You’d do anything to get what you want.”

“You’re right.  And I want Sam, Gabriel,” Lucifer says, narrowing his eyes.  “He’s my one true vessel.”

Gabriel shakes his head and rolls his eyes skyward.  “I’ve heard.  Why are you still talking to me?”

“Because if Sam Winchester gets it in his pretty little head that there’s another Archangel after him – a sweet, little Trickster Archangel who wants nothing to do with the destiny Sam so desperately wants to avoid – he might never agree to let me in,” Lucifer explains.

Gabriel mouth drops open.  “I’m not _after_ Sam,” he tells him, wishing his voice sounded surer.

“Come on, I’m not a moron.  And I’ve read your thoughts, and not even just the conscious ones.  So I know how badly you want him.  I didn’t realize it was love until a few minutes ago, but I know.”  Lucifer raises his eyebrows at him, taking a few steps back to look him up and down.  “What do you think you can offer him, little brother?  You’re barely an Archangel.  Definitely not more powerful than the ones he’s trying to avoid.  You’re an angel stuck in a human male, using your Grace to play pranks, one of which was killing his brother a hundred times over.  And you’re the coward who ran away from home when things got ugly.”  Lucifer chuckles to himself as he watches Gabriel unconsciously fold in on himself.  He gestures to all of Gabriel, to everything he is, with a quick flick of his wrist.  “What could you possibly have that he would want?”

Gabriel finds himself staring at the bricks beside him, at a loss for words.

“Give up, Gabriel,” Lucifer says, his voice and eyes softer now.  Gabriel smiles bitterly, remembering that same voice telling him to do the opposite, to beat his little wings until he finally pulled himself off the ground.  “You might not deserve Sam, but you do deserve happiness, little brother.  You can avoid all of the pain and destruction.  You can stay invisible.  Go be a god on some far away planet.  You’d never have to think about any of us ever again.  You could just be free and alone.”

Gabriel closes his eyes, easily picturing the life Lucifer describes.  He’d lived it once before.

“All you have to do is leave.  Leave Earth and leave Sam Winchester alone.”

When Gabriel opens his eyes again, he finds himself shaking his head.  Lucifer’s right; he could leave tomorrow.  But he thinks of Dean calling him a coward and of the strength in Castiel’s eyes as he stood his ground against Heaven.  He finally thinks of Sam’s eyes – his warm, chocolate-colored eyes – and realizes why he’s so fixated on them.  The feeling that they hold, the thing that makes them so enchanting.

“Hope,” he finally says, swallowing hard.

“What?” Lucifer asks, seemingly surprised to receive a response.

“Hope,” Gabriel repeats, meeting his brother’s gaze.  “That’s what I have to offer.  I have hope.”

“Hope for what?” Lucifer asks, quickly growing irritated.

Gabriel smiles to himself, albeit a little brokenly, and shakes his head.  “The fact that you even have to ask shows that you don’t have much to offer Sammy yourself.”

“I have power,” Lucifer tells him, voice rising in volume.  “I have destiny on my side.”

“Yeah, that ought to do it.  Winchesters love authority and fate.”

“I will end you, Gabriel, if you get in my way,” Lucifer warns him, eyes a little wary now, probably having originally thought that this would be an easy argument to win.  If he’s resorting to threats of violence, he’s already lost.  “I won’t even think twice.”

“It would shock me if you did,” Gabriel tells him.  He looks away from Lucifer as he realizes just how much he means that.

His brother is gone after that, disappearing to the loud sound of flapping wings.  He doesn’t know where Lucifer goes when he flies off, if he has some sort of dungeon or lair.  All he knows is that he’s alone again, bitter and without a family.  He forgets why he ever thought that was a comfort.

He initially thinks of going to visit Sam and Dean, since it has been his go-to option as of late, but remembers that they both hate him.  Dean would probably shoot him with the nearest loaded firearm, which would be inconvenient for everyone involved.  He has to wonder, though… does Sam really hate him?  The younger Winchester always seems to have that hopeful look in his eyes when he sees Gabriel, like he’s trying to figure him out, like he’s trying to find some sort of redeeming quality.  Sam looks for the good in people on instinct, as if he can’t help himself.  But that doesn’t mean that Sam can find it in Gabriel.  In fact, Gabriel’s not even entirely sure he can find it in himself.  Lucifer’s words – his quips about Gabriel’s comparative weakness, his cowardice, his overall lack of appeal to someone like Sam – hurt because it’s all true.  And while Gabriel can normally laugh off the Winchester’s annoyance with him, tonight he needs to be away from it.  He doesn’t want to see the distain on Sam’s face right now, even coupled with his curious, hopeful eyes.

He settles for nibbling on a chocolate bar in the thick brush of the rainforest, settling beneath a tree.  If there’s one thing he’s been consistently good at, it’s hiding.  The chocolate tastes bitter in his mouth as he realizes that’s what he’s doing – hiding, again, like always – and he chucks it into the tangle of vines along the forest floor.  He shoves his hands into his hair and pulls his knees to his chest, feeling like screaming, like watching the trunks of the trees around him split up the middle as his voice shakes the ground and the air.  Instead, he presses his forehead to his knees and grinds his teeth.

He told Lucifer that he had hope.  But maybe he’s not so sure.

Rather than thinking about that – about Sam and his hopeful eyes, about his family, about his pathetic excuse of an archangel life – he wraps his wings around his body, encasing himself in the comforting feeling of feathers and his Grace, and, for the first time in a millennium, he sleeps.


End file.
